Monthly Archives: April 2014

We have already written about how Leadership and Delivery Teams operate in a Real Agility Program. It’s time to look at our Recommendations component: getting started on the right path for Real Agility.

Recommendations = Assessment + Playbook

In the assessment portion of the Recommendations component, we gather information about the current situation at an organization. This includes everything from detailed practices, processes and tools, to strategies and organizational culture. This assessment work is designed to help everyone understand the organization’s current gaps, and what strengths it has that will best support it to cross those gaps to Real Agility. The Assessment includes an online portion, an on-site portion and an off-site portion. The assessment work naturally leads to the development of the playbook.

The online assessment requires that each person throughout an organization complete an online survey about corporate culture. It includes three major sections: existing challenges, sense of urgency, and level of teamwork. This cultural survey is the foundation of understanding how to be successful with Real Agility. Managers and leaders are also asked to complete an additional questionnaire about the current environment at the organization. This includes high-level information about the structure of the organization, client and vendor relationships, and staff. Additional surveys may also be administered to understand other aspects of the organization. For example, in an organization that is struggling to use Scrum, we will often use the Scrum Team Assessment.

The onsite portion of the assessment combines in-person interviews and workshops with staff and managers. Interviews explore aspects of the corporate work environment in more depth and include questions about familiarity with Agile methods, and obstacles that people might see to adopting Agile. The workshops gather data around current challenges and strengths, success criteria for projects, situational analysis for teams, and existing metrics (or lack thereof). Typically we need a meeting room committed to our consultants for doing interviews.

The offsite portion of the assessment is used for us to evaluate and analyze the survey, interview and workshop results. We also use some time to review any relevant documentation such as process templates, org charts, governance requirements, etc. We may also use some of this time for follow-up phone calls or emails to clarify aspects of the assessment results. Finally, this offsite work is also where we do the bulk of the development of the recommendations in the playbook.

Several aspects of our assessment are based on the OpenAgile Catalyst Assessment Tools which are open-source and can be found online. We also have a number of proprietary tools.

The playbook maps out a path to a successful Real Agility transformation. It is a road map that helps leaders, managers and team members make good business decisions as they strive for Real Agility. The playbook aids the organization to effectively and appropriately launch Real Agility teams: management teams, project teams, and operational teams. The Real Agility Program playbook includes analysis of the assessment results, recommendations for work that the organization can do on its own and suggests outside assistance that enhances Real Agility results. Two critical questions that are answered in the Playbook include:

What Agile method or methods should we be using and why?

What organizational change approach should we take and why?

We deliver the recommendations in the form of the playbook and an executive summary slide deck in an iterative and incremental fashion so that stakeholders can give us early feedback and so that we can adapt our assessment agenda as we go along. The recommendations include ideas about organizational structure, staffing, governance changes, departmental relationships, tooling, and many other aspects of how an enterprise can best become and Agile enterprise.

Following the Recommendations in the Real Agility Program playbook results in huge time-to-market improvements, 200% (or better) productivity boost for delivery teams, and extremely satisfied customers and staff.

Affiliated Promotions:

Try our automated online Scrum coach: Scrum Insight - free scores and basic advice, upgrade to get in-depth insight for your team. It takes between 8 and 11 minutes for each team member to fill in the survey, and your results are available immediately. Try it in your next retrospective.

I am currently working with a relatively new Scrum team (5 Sprints/weeks young) that needs to rewrite their Personal Development Plans (PDPs) in order to better support Scrum and the team. PDPs are still the deliverables of individuals required by the organization and likely will be for some time. The organization is still in the early days of Agile adoption (pilots) and they are large. So, instead of giving them a sermon on why metrics for managed individuals are bad, I am going to help them take the step towards Agility that they are ready to take.

work as a team to develop a PDP for each individual team member that directly supports the team’s high-performance Goal (already established)—

in other words, when considering an appropriate PDP per individual, the team will start with the team’s performance Goal and build the individual PDP from there;

develop a plan as a team for how the team will support each team member to fulfill his/her individual PDP—

in other words, all individual PDPs will be part of the team’s plan for team improvement;

Internally publish the plan (share with management).

I’ll follow up with another post to let everyone know how it goes.

Affiliated Promotions:

Try our automated online Scrum coach: Scrum Insight - free scores and basic advice, upgrade to get in-depth insight for your team. It takes between 8 and 11 minutes for each team member to fill in the survey, and your results are available immediately. Try it in your next retrospective.

Of course, I don’t mean to say that we should never be sceptical. Rather, sometimes we just have acknowledge reality: there is no magic to make a red line with a green marker. The role of the expert is to clarify reality to others through their knowledge and experience.

When I am doing CSM and CSPO training, I often am faced with people who want to know how to make high-performance teams with distributed team members. They are often looking for some sort of magical solution. This is an example of not being willing to face the reality that distance makes communication slower, less effective, and less likely to happen at all.

I’m sure all of you have interesting experiences of being the expert in something and your audience pushing you to find the magical solution… share your stories in the comments please!

Affiliated Promotions:

Try our automated online Scrum coach: Scrum Insight - free scores and basic advice, upgrade to get in-depth insight for your team. It takes between 8 and 11 minutes for each team member to fill in the survey, and your results are available immediately. Try it in your next retrospective.

Please share!

I was recently checking my Google Analytics for Agile Advice and the article I wrote quite a while back in 2009 about teamwork skills is even more popular than the front page of this blog! I took a look at it and made some tweaks including providing some good references for more information about each of the teamwork skills. Take a look: Seven Essential Teamwork Skills. The only hard one was to find a good article about “sharing” as a teamwork skill. If you know of one, please comment so that I can add it! I’ll even be happy to take a link to an article you have written yourself.

Affiliated Promotions:

Try our automated online Scrum coach: Scrum Insight - free scores and basic advice, upgrade to get in-depth insight for your team. It takes between 8 and 11 minutes for each team member to fill in the survey, and your results are available immediately. Try it in your next retrospective.

Please share!

One of our big plans this summer is to have a selection of advanced Scrum and Agile – related training courses. We are delivering some of them ourselves, but we are also bring in outside experts for others.

Our schedule for these events will be finalized in the next few weeks. If you are interested in any of these courses, please pre-register here. Pre-registration will give you a guaranteed spot and a discount of 10% above and beyond the early-bird registration price.

Affiliated Promotions:

Try our automated online Scrum coach: Scrum Insight - free scores and basic advice, upgrade to get in-depth insight for your team. It takes between 8 and 11 minutes for each team member to fill in the survey, and your results are available immediately. Try it in your next retrospective.

I recently had the opportunity to help facilitate a client’s “Innovation Challenge”. Basically, the concept is to get a bunch of people in the room, give them a business challenge and see what they come up with.

I have to say that the format of the workshop that I used is heavily inspired by a training that I did recently called Specification By Example by Gojko Adzic. I strongly recommend this seminar as well as the book. Another strong influence is The Inmates are Running the Asylum… by Alan Cooper. The workshop that I have developed is a sort of hybrid approach, with my own flavour added to the mix. During an early iteration of the workshop, I didn’t have a title and one of the participants suggested “Agile Inception”. I think that title works in a space where Agile is established and well understood (e.g. hopefully this blog). At the same time, this workshop can be run with people who have no prior experience or knowledge of Agile and without even mentioning the word Agile. This is also good in certain environments where people have developed an Agile allergy.

Anyhow, my goal for the day was to facilitate the building of shared understanding of the challenge itself as well as some ways that the organization could innovate around that challenge through conversation and collaboration.

From the opening remarks it became clear that the product at the centre of the “challenge” was actually in deep crisis: a shrinking market combined with shrinking market share. The product had generated approximately $18M in revenue in 2009, compared with $10.4M projected for 2014. That’s half dead in some people’s books. The clear Goal was to reverse that trend, starting with at least $11M in 2015. They needed a powerful jolt of life-giving innovation energy to defibrillate their failing product’s heart.

There were no shortage of ideas about how the product could become better & more profitable. In fact, there were many, many ideas. Too many, perhaps. Once we had established our working agreement for the day, we did a Starfish Retrospective exercise to make visible all of the things that the group wanted to keep doing, start doing, stop doing, do more of and do less of. Many post-it notes were stuck on the board and we left them there as a reminder of all of the things that people were thinking about that could help us to consider how the product and ways of working on it could be improved.

Then we talked about the Goal. True innovation—that is, tangible, innovative results with clear benefits—requires a group to focus on a single, clear, SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound) Goal that everyone in the organization understands and is committed to achieving. Often times, as was the case with the group on Thursday, taking time to establish shared understanding of the goal can seem redundant and tedious (“we already know what the goal is…”). However, as we learned through the process of working in small groups to re-articulate understanding of the Goal back to the “customer” (the person paying for everyone to be there) this often requires some further conversation. Indeed, when the groups presented their understanding of the Goal, there were gaps that needed to be filled by the “customer”. It took less than 30 minutes to discuss, adapt and confirm the Goal with the customer. The value of this investment of everyone’s time was tremendous. The conversation made it clear that shared understanding had already been established to a degree and enabled the group to build on what was already there to make the Goal “SMARTer” in the minds of all of the participants.

A single, transparent business Goal helps us to innovate with focus—to create the right thing. In addition, we need to develop a single Persona—the ideal, “imaginary” user of the product. The larger group broke into smaller groups for the subsequent discussions. The groups worked separately and generated a the details for a few personas. All 3 personas added value to the conversation. The Persona of “Lisa” was particularly compelling to the “customer” because she had a clear goal of her own and through innovation, her goal could be aligned with the overall business Goal to create a powerful, “new” product that just might reverse the downward trend.

The next step in innovating with focus in order to generate the best ideas possible: build shared understanding of how Lisa can pursue her goal through her experience of the product in order for the business Goal to be achieved. In other words, Lisa needs a story. Her story needs a beginning and an end (for now, until the next story) and all the stages of her journey need to be integrated into a coherent whole.

The last step was for the groups to brainstorm and come up with different ways that the product can deliver Lisa’s story in order to realize the Goal.

I wish I could say more about the really cool ideas that the group came up with, but I am erring on the side of caution when it comes to protecting my client’s competitive advantage.

To wrap up the session, we took a quick, anonymous gauge of how confident the participants felt about achieving the Goal. Of the 13 participants, two gave their confidence a score of 8/10, six gave a score of 7/10, four scored themselves a 6/10 and one was a 3/10, for an average of 6.5/10. Not bad, but clearly some work still to go. So what’s next for them?

Next steps:

Get the technical folks involved in the conversation (ideally, they are there from the beginning)

Build an increment of their solution

Review

Continue the conversation and collaboration to build shared understanding

Re-gauge the confidence score

Iterate

Repeat

The likelihood of achieving the Goal increases with every iteration

Affiliated Promotions:

Try our automated online Scrum coach: Scrum Insight - free scores and basic advice, upgrade to get in-depth insight for your team. It takes between 8 and 11 minutes for each team member to fill in the survey, and your results are available immediately. Try it in your next retrospective.

Please share!

Here’s an article that just drives me nuts: Using Agile Scrum to Manage Developer Teams. The problem I have with this article is that it is just crazy bad in its use of language and ignorance about the fundamentals. Here are some examples:

Scrum is definitely not an SDLC. Scrum is a framework (and the author uses the term correctly a little earlier in the article) but is deliberately missing most of the details that would make it an SDLC. It is designed to be incomplete instead of complete. SDLC’s are meant to be complete solutions for delivering software. Scrum shows you the gaps and exposes the problems you have delivering products but doesn’t tell you how to fill in the gaps and solve the problems.

Next, the article mis-quotes Scrum.org by incorrectly capitalizing Product Owner and Scrum Master. And in some sort of ironic error, puts “Scrum master” in quotes. Yikes!

The conclusion of the article about when you might choose not to use Scrum is also a bit mis-guided. There are lots of organizations successfully using Scrum in highly regulated environments: medical, banking, government, etc. Some of them are even my clients! I would be happy to provide direct references if needed.

Finally:

Does your team work remotely? Despite advances in video technology and online collaboration tools, the requirements for structured daily contact makes Agile Scrum tough to implement successfully for virtual teams.

Yes, remote work is bad with Scrum. But it’s also just plain bad. Don’t do it if you can avoid it. All that Scrum does with a remote team is show you just how bad it really is.

Affiliated Promotions:

Try our automated online Scrum coach: Scrum Insight - free scores and basic advice, upgrade to get in-depth insight for your team. It takes between 8 and 11 minutes for each team member to fill in the survey, and your results are available immediately. Try it in your next retrospective.

If you are in an environment that is struggling to get stakeholders to your review, ask yourself if you have chosen an impossible day of the week for this ceremony.

Please, for the sake of your team(s)….

When considering when your Sprint will end,
think of the ability of your stakeholders
to actually show up once in a while!

Stakeholders are people too. They don’t want to let the team down either.

(Emphasis added.)

Mike has great experience working with Scrum teams and I hope you read through his other articles as well.

Affiliated Promotions:

Try our automated online Scrum coach: Scrum Insight - free scores and basic advice, upgrade to get in-depth insight for your team. It takes between 8 and 11 minutes for each team member to fill in the survey, and your results are available immediately. Try it in your next retrospective.